Apple in another dust-up with its fans: iMacs, MacBooks lack filters, choke on grime – lawsuit Apple was sued in the US this week over claims that design flaws in its iMac desktop and MacBook laptop computers allow dust into the machines, causing the screens, fans, and circuitry to fail. The complaint, filed Wednesday in San Jose, California, on behalf of plaintiffs Kim Ahern of Arizona, Nikolas Frenzel of Colorado, and …
Yeah, the filters part is going to doom this lawsuit. The issue is that Apple is making it unusually difficult and expensive for customers to perform routine cleaning needed to keep the computer working. It's weird because all of this was figured out in the 60 years ago when people smoked at work. Needs airflow : cleaning access. Doesn't need airflow : gasket.
It fits but it's still not a good look for Apple customers... the narrowly-spaced stack of copper slices welded onto the end of the heatpipe is a de facto filter... A machine is a space heater and air cleaner that also happens to do lots of math for decoding pictures of cats. Some machines are more ...suicidal, than others.
> but only where the two 120mm fans are located
Well then are the fans backward? If the fans breathe through the filters, then the idea is they blow out the various gaps and vents and so dust is reduced.
However, if your box was assembled by the same morons I usually see, the fans blow out into the filters, which is a complete waste of time.
First of all, most of grime going into a PC is not dust it is lint.
1. De-Linting is not filtering, it can and is normally handled by static attraction. Even if you have fine mesh on the intakes (as my desktop PCs and home server do) it holds lint mostly because of static and not mechanical filtering (at least initially, it becomes mechanical as it clogs up).
2. Your typical mesh/holed intake on a PC can stop quite a lot of lint by static alone. It is effectively a form of filter.
3. That quite clearly stops working on a nice fully grounded "cute" metal body which has no paint on top.
Back to Numer 3 - this is what an idiot tax operation victim has bought. They bought a system which has been relieved from household lint protection by design. As the time goes it will get clogged in inside by lint because it ain't sticking to the intake.
Most PC's and laptops can be taken apart and be maintained. I have an 8 year old I7 Tosh laptop that's still rocking. A number of the laptops I've used have had panels underneath which give access to the heatsinks so that they can be brushed clear.
Regular maintenance is just part of owning a machine, like changing the oil on a car... something which the average consumer just doesn't seem to be aware of. It's as if they think that laptops, etc. are just magic boxes that sit under desks and perform their magic until the hard drive gets full and it's time to change the whole box, because the operating system is not supported any more... or some such guff. (in my neck of the woods, the PSU seems to be the most common point of early failure these days. Used to be RAM death.)
So the idiot tax is working exactly as designed... a tax on idiots ... or to be more honest, those who are uneducated in maintenance of their machines. And those who are now educated in such things, are starting to get upset because they've finally realised how Apple works. (and a few others, to be honest... some laptops do require a certain degree of disassembly for dust maintenance... those who install the screw panels are the good guys who put a bit of extra thought for the customer)
To be fair it's most laptops now with non removable batteries that are an added crime. How to swap RAM or a drive if you can't power down? Gel pack batteries are no excuse, as anyone who has pried open a device to change one knows. Especially nonsense when many laptop batteries carefully locked away and as inaccessible as possible are the same black brick just screwed in.
" I don't see a dust filter on any one of them!"
Yes, that's because through clever design those are integrated into the case. Essentially meshed surfaces are fairly decent dust filters. The idea is that they catch all the big particles while the rest will simply be blown out by the fans. I've first seen an eary concept of those in an expensive measurement device. There was a hive-like structure perhaps 2-4 cm deep just mounted on the air inlet. This structure cought all the relevant dust and kept the rest of the device virtually dust free.
"Instead, Apple tells customers that they must replace the entire screen, at a cost exceeding $600, apparently in order to increase Apple’s profits at the expense of the customer."
Let's be honest, the geniusesidiots handling the service repairs probably don't know how easy it is to remove the screen or simply don't care. They type the word "screen" into their computer and it spits back $600, that's basically it. Apple isn't paying them to think.
Of course, if we're talking third-party licensed repair services, then they need to make back what they paid Apple for the privilege of touching the holy device in the first place.
Only trained Apple Certified Technicians wearing full face and body hazmat protection should attempt to make contact with the untested and potentially detrimental dust.
Apple insists all dust related matters can be most readily resolved by updating to the latest device, or preferably the newest iPad.
Think of dust as an expiration date. Dust is a sign you need to be cleansed of more dirty money.
Apple insists all dust related matters can be most readily resolved
Was the real reason for them declaring they'd have dividends awhile back simply anticipation of, and making it harder, to short their stock?
It's been quite a long time since any real innovation, and things like this story keep going on and on - this outfit gets you coming and going and revels in the highest margins in the biz.
Which is insulting enough that I managed to avoid them so far...but it really does look like they might be getting ready to lose it in a way that is publicly recognized - and financially actionable.
APPL is still the most heavily shorted stock on the NYSE.
Like here, there are loads of people who hate everything to do with Apple. The only difference is that many of them make a pretty decent living betting on APPL falling on a given day.
As there are loads of (cough, cough) supposedly independant analists (with emphasis IMHO on the first four letters) crawling over the company, its employees and suppliers and then making up headline stories about the company being in financial meltdown due to a 1% drop in order for component X from company Y while ignoring that Apple has increased orders from Company Z, there is ample factoids for the shorters to bet on and cause the whole market to rise and fall.
This is a fact of life for Apple and Tesla and a few other companies.
Yet there are the likes of MS, Amazon and Google who seem to escape this manipulation. Amazon with its pretty bad P/E ratio is a risk as well.
I've moved out of stocks and into cash and bonds as I happen to think that there is a huge market correction about to hit most of the world's stock markets. APPL and the rest are horribly overvalued.
That said, I am not a financial advisor and have no direct investment in any of the companies mentioned.
Apple is (or was for many months when it kept rising, not sure if it is still is now that it has already fallen 25%) the most heavily shorted stock in dollar terms, which isn't surprising as it also has (or had, until Microsoft closed higher today) the largest market cap.
It is nowhere near the most heavily shorted stock in terms of percentage of float, which is how analysts measure "the most heavily shorted stock".
I'm as much of a (Cr)Apple fanboi as the next cat over, sans the spining rust, then known an an iPod. That was something far FAR to good for them, and as such eventlualy lead to their downfall as a computer manufacture.
But, WHY are we only targeting Apple here? Surly other Laptop OEMs are just as guilty of not including a bit of Fabric to protect the fan from dust, and as such force the machine to run hotter, and slower, due to having such a filter, that would never get replaced anyway.
Ex Mac Technician here....
1. Filters are not the answer: Filters get blocked, like fans, and would result in the machines over heating
2. There's normally 3 fans in an iMac: Power supply, HDD and CPU areas. There's normally no air gap between the display and outer screen, so highly unlikely this would be the cause. If you've ever repaired an iMac screen, you'll know how difficult it is to keep it dust free. Having an air gap would encourage dust...
3. I've pulled apart some disgusting machines: Most of those with display staining were due to smokers. Most of those with clogged fans on laptops used them on beds
4. Even with today's unrepairable laptops, it doesn't take much to take the back off and give the fans a quick blast with a can of compressed air.
Same for me, an ex Genius. The interior cleanliness of the machines I repaired entirely depended on the environment they had been used in. The range was wide and we could and did refuse service on more than one machine including one that had some insects living inside it.
As for removing the glass to clean it - 2012+ iMacs have the glass bonded to the LCD to allow the machines to be thinner, so the whole assembly needs to be replaced.
It may be bonded on, but replacing the entire assembly is complete tosh. The bonding strips just need to be replaced, which takes an "amateur" like myself doing it for the first (and preferably only) time no more than half an hour utilising a plastic spudger, a microfibre cloth and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. End cost is less than a tenner in consumables and tools.
2. [...] There's normally no air gap between the display and outer screen, so highly unlikely this would be the cause.
Yet it's a known problem (read the thread to the end) and here is the solution (replace the display). At least with the pre-2012 iMacs you could pull the outer pane off with suckers and give both the outer pane and the display a clean, 2012+ iMac screens can't be cleaned.
4. Even with today's unrepairable laptops, it doesn't take much to take the back off and give the fans a quick blast with a can of compressed air.
Look at the video above, Louis Rossmann needed an ultrasonic cleaner to bring a MacBook board back to life. If you reply saying "yeah but corrosion", watch again - he repaired the corrosion, plugged it in at 2:56 and it was still dead, put it in the cleaner, then afterwards it powered up.
My Mac Pro is appropriately/unofficially named "trashcan style", maybe for UK they should name it "dustbin".
I vacuumed it out and used compressed air on the innards last week for the first time after 4 years of near 24/7 operation. There are no filters, as such the electronics, vents and surfaces have been performing a decent air filter role for 4 years so the satisfying amount of cr*p that I cleaned out of it was impressive.
Unlike the all-in-one Macs, the current Mac Pro is really easy to get the case off and maintain :) The fan runs slower since the maintenance and I can see average component temperatures are lower using a monitoring utility.
Must do this more regularly...
Instead, Apple tells customers that they must replace the entire screen, at a cost exceeding $600, apparently in order to increase Apple’s profits at the expense of the customer
...
...And?
I agree that's probably more or less what they do (with the caveat that maybe sometimes the cheap fix would not work), but then what? They are treating customers like cash cows? Yeah, they are. You think it's scummy? Be my guest. But suing a company for doing that feels daft. Have they considered suing luxury brands for selling items at ten times the cost of production?
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